Monday, October 29, 2012

The Cleveland Browns’ win over the
San Diego Chargers on Sunday didn’t necessarily teach fans anything
new with the possible exception that a tedious win is always better
than a competitive loss.

Until Sunday, the Browns had a knack,
honed over several years, of teasing their fans with all manner of
competitive losses, the kind of “if only the
defense/offense/special teams had done this or that” that
inevitably caused fans to try to find a reason to keep watching the
team.

Sunday’s victory couldn’t possibly
have won over any converts. It’s not as if the Browns had just
hammered the New York Giants by clicking in all 3 phases. The win
was against a reeling Chargers team coached by Marvin Lewis West
Coast Edition that looked and played like it wanted to be anywhere
but Cleveland on a cold, rainy Sunday.

But for once it’s not necessary to
pick through the bones of a loss that could have been a win. Instead
fans can turn fate on its head by picking through the bones of a win
that could have been a loss. Now there’s hope and change that fans
can embrace.

Even if one were to pick through the
bones there wouldn’t be much meat available anyway. The Browns put
together exactly one good drive and it was the first one of the day.
That drive was kept alive because either the elements scared the
beejeezus out of head coach Pat Shurmur or because he finally is
beginning to understand that when you’re the head coach of a team
that wins about as frequently as members of Congress agree on
something substantive (or even insubstantial) there’s no reason to
play it cautiously.

At the Chargers’ 26-yard line and
facing a 4th and what looked to be mere inches, Shurmur
decided to roll the dice and have the 6 foot 3 inch Brandon Weeden
try to find the inch that Al Pacino screams about in “Any Given
Sunday.” It wasn’t Shurmur’s boldest call of the season but it
was out of character. In far more crucial situations he’s foregone
the attempt. Here, the first possession of the game, he decides that
maybe now’s the time to grow a pair which is what you might think
actually happened until you remember that faced with another 4th
down call later in the game, Shurmur reverted to form.

Anyway, given that it really was just a
few inches, it wasn’t that gutsy of a call and the first down was
easily secured. It worked out well because it set up Trent
Richardson’s 26-yard touchdown run that, along with Phil Dawson’s
extra point, gave the Browns a lead they never relinquished. (I
honestly can’t remember the last time I wrote a sentence like that
applied to the Browns and something they did early in a game. Maybe
never.)

From there the game was a mind numbing
array of offensive ineptitude from both teams. The Browns punted the
ball on 9 straight possessions. Fortunately, though, they weren’t
all 3-and-outs. There was enough of a running game, thanks mostly to
Richardson, to keep the clock moving mercifully for the brave few
that thought sitting outside at Cleveland Stadium on a raw, rainy day
was preferable to just about anything else that one could find to do
on a raw, rainy day.

For their part, the Chargers moved the
ball a little and got a couple of field goals. They also arguably
threatened near the end of the game, but not really. There’s was a
game plan that seemed to center around trying to get the ball to
Antonio Gates and why not? He was being covered by Buster Skrine
most of the day, which generally means trouble for the Browns.

But in one of the abiding mysteries
that is football, a game like Sunday can turn previous goats into
almost heroes. While it’s not time to completely reconsider
Skrine, let’s reconsider him briefly.

Skrine put together a game that made
him not just resemble but play like a legitimate NFL defensive back.
Skrine’s biggest play was the pass deflection near the end of the
game that ended the last Charger threat. It was a good play,
unquestionably. It also was the kind of play that usually doesn’t
get made by the Browns, which is why they have so many competitive
losses. The knack for just missing on a play that turns the game has
been a specialty of Browns 2.0.

But on this particular Sunday, all of
the elements combined not just for the beginnings of a tropical storm
of historic proportions but for Skrine as well. He made Gates a
non-factor. That’s not a small accomplishment.

Before anyone rewrites the Buster
Skrine narrative, let’s not lose perspective. Skrine still makes
Brandon McDonald look like Darrelle Reavis and until Skrine can
string together a few more games like Sunday, and particularly
against quarterbacks with more confidence than Phillip Rivers, he
still remains on the suspect list. He just gets a reprieve for the
week. Good show, Buster. Spend some time with Lucille or a Loose
Seal. You choose.

The other goat turned near hero was
punter Reggie Hodges or maybe that goes to Shurmur for keeping
Hodges. But before getting to Hodges, let’s examine a little of
the context that adds still more color to an incredibly colorless
game.

The Browns had 10 possessions on
Sunday. Lacking the vast resources, servers and unpaid interns
residing in Bristol, Connecticut, I have no idea how many times a
team has had 10 possessions in a game, punted on the last 9 of them
and still won the game. It can’t have happened very often, right?
If you score on only one possession you can only get, at most, 8
points, usually 7, sometimes 6, sometimes 3. So right there a team
rarely if ever wins scoring 8 or fewer points.

In the last two years, there have been
only 4 games, including Sunday's, in which a team has scored less
than 10 points and won the game and Cleveland and Kansas City were
involved in two of them, which makes sense because both teams have
been pretty crappy and scoring challenged.

Earlier this season Baltimore beat
Kansas City 9-6. But in that game, Baltimore had 3 drives in which
they scored, although on field goals only. In week 17 last year the
Chiefs beat the Denver Broncos 7-3. On the surface, it looks similar
to Sunday’s game but f beauty is only skin deep so too is ugly. It
featured only one touchdown by the Chiefs but they had two other
possessions that didn’t result in punts. The first was a missed
field goal. The second was a turnover. (Denver, with the overrated
Tim Tebow was even more inept but still had more than one scoring
opportunity all day. It’s just that they only scored on one of
their opportunities. The other was a missed field goal. And by the
way, interesting fact, the two punters who got a work out that day
are brothers.)

The third game was when the Browns beat
the Seahawks last October 6-3. The six points were the result of two
Dawson field goals, meaning that the Browns at least scored on two
possessions. In fact, the Browns had four scoring opportunities in
that game. Dawson also missed two field goals (the ones he made were
from 53 and 52 yards, so what does that tell you about how poorly the
Browns moved the ball in that game?)

What made Sunday’s game unique was
simply that but for the one drive they couldn’t even get close
enough again for a Dawson field goal attempt nor did they turn it
over or even turn it over on downs (which isn't a surprise because
Shurmur just can't stand 4th and short). To keep the
Chargers at bay, Hodges was called on repeatedly and delivered,
repeatedly. He had four kicks inside the 20 yard line. As bad as
Hodges was a week before was as good as he was on Sunday. Kudos to
Shurmur. I thought he should have at least put Hodges on the hot
seat by auditioning other punters. Shurmur, as is his wont, didn’t
do anything and in the end and for another week Shurmur was right for
not overreacting to Hodges’ disaster against Indianapolis.

At that, there was precious little left
to inform about Sunday’s game, including precious little about Greg
“Precious” Little. Browns receivers did little because Weeden
couldn’t figure out the wind and Shurmur stuck to what was working.
Rivers couldn't do anything either, flagging confidence, tricky winds
and general indifference the main culprits. It all was enough for a
Cleveland win and in a town starved for wins, it’s really all that
matters.

**

I noted Shurmur’s decision to try to
convert 4th and inches early in the game as being out of
character, which it was. What’s not out of character is the
confounding decision- making that tends to dominate Shurmur’s
coaching style, if you want to call it that.

Shurmur let another 4th down
conversion go by the way side, which was expected. I’ll let that
one slide because it wasn’t a particularly critical moment of the
game and because the Browns were winning and the Chargers were not
doing anything particularly effectively.

But a word or two about the challenge
flag Shurmur threw on the Chargers’ very next play after the
Richardson touchdown. After the Dawson kickoff, the Chargers started
from their own 18 yard line. Rivers completed a short pass to Robert
Meachem for all of 6 yards. The fans screamed their objection
because it didn’t look to be a clean catch. Shurmur through the
challenge flag and a few minutes later the call was overturned. Yea,
fans. Shut up next time.

The challenge was correct but to what
end and at what cost? It was still the first quarter so it wasn’t
as if Shurmur had any legitimate reason to think the Richardson
touchdown would be the last one of the day by either team.
Meanwhile, a coach only gets 2 challenges per game. If he’s right
on both challenges, then he gets a third. That’s why coaches
generally make sure that they use their challenges when they matter
most. Wasting a challenge early when the situation doesn’t dictate
means that the challenge may not be there when needed. Moreover,
historically the success rate of a challenge is about 50%, making
Shurmur’s decision even more puzzling that early in the game.

There are plenty of plays that could be
challenged but that doesn’t mean they all should be. Deciding to
challenge is not just a function of whether you think you’re
correct but the ramifications either way of not challenging and/or
being wrong.

In this case, the best that could be
said was that Shurmur was trying to keep the Chargers’ pinned in,
something that did in fact happen when the Chargers were unable to
get a first down. That doesn’t justify the poor decision making.
The likelihood that there would be more pivotal moments to challenge
in a game that still had over 50 minutes of time remaining were
pretty high. But I guess when you know your job is hanging by a
thread nothing it's better to look good then be good.

**

Indulge me for a moment, will you?
Even though the Browns’ victory didn’t generate much knowledge,
there were Browns-related items of interest to ponder from Sunday.
My favorite, though, revolves around the Chiefs in general and their
head coach, Romeo Crennel, in particular.

I’ve been covering and writing about
the Browns for over 6 years now, 6 mind numbing, infuriating,
frustrating years. One of my earliest columns was entitled, simply,
“Romeo Crennel Must Go.” The Browns were nearly two years into
the Crennel experiment and it wasn’t going very well. What
prompted the column was an embarrassing loss against Cincinnati in
which Braylon Edwards went after Charlie Frye on the sidelines for
some perceived grievance or another while Crennel looked the other
way, perhaps eyeing up cheesesteak concessionaire, I’m not sure.

It was clear at that point that Crennel
had lost the team and it was out of control. The Browns won only 4
games that season but stuck with Crennel anyway. The next season,
with an easy schedule to manage, the Crennel-coached Browns went 10-6
but didn’t make the playoffs. If you think a 9 punt game in which
your team still wins is rare, research how many 10 win teams haven’t
made the playoffs. Only in Cleveland. Of course the Browns
regressed to their norm the following season and won 4 games. That’s
when Randy Lerner finally fired Crennel.

Personally, I always liked Crennel.
He’s genial. He’s a gentleman. He cares about his players and
coaches. He’s a good defensive coordinator. But the one thing
he’s not is a head coach. He lacks the organizational skills
necessary to pull together an entire franchise. Fans who think
Shurmur looks clueless on game days must have short memories because
Shurmur looks like Dick Vermeil compared to Crennel. I bring all
this up because of what’s happening n Kansas City right now.

As the Chiefs stumbled through another
loss on Sunday, Crennel was asked why, with Brady Quinn as their
quarterback, they didn’t simply hand the ball off to Jamaal
Charles, their only offensive threat, more than 5 times. Crennel,
honest as a politician isn’t, shrugged and said he didn’t know.
What’s great about that answer is that it just shows how little
Crennel has changed.

When he handed over the reigns of the
Cleveland offense to Maurice Carthon, Crennel was asked almost weekly
why the Browns did this or that on offense when the more obvious call
would have been that and this. Crennel then, just as now, shrugged
and said he didn’t know. He meant it then and means it now. He
really doesn’t know what’s going on with his team, particularly
if it's happening on offense. Once a defensive coordinator, always a
defensive coordinator I guess.

The other great thing about the Chiefs
is a stat that says that despite their one win this season, they’ve
not lead once in regulation all year. I’d say that’s a
surprising stat, indeed, a rare stat, but I just got done writing
about the Browns punting on the last 9 possessions of a game in which
they had 10 possessions total and still won.

Meanwhile, all of this just goes to
show why general managers get fired. Chiefs general manager Scott
Pioli let himself get sucked into thinking that the Browns of the
Crennel-era were better than their 24-40 record would indicate. They
weren’t. It’s a decision Pioli will regret because when Crennel
is fired, perhaps before season’s end, Pioli will be likewise
looking for work. Maybe he’ll find it in Cleveland.

**

The Browns play the Ravens next week
and it’s a chance to pick up their second straight win against a
AFC North rival. The Ravens are rested but beat up and aren’t as
good as their record. Of course, either are the Browns. Maybe it
will be sunny

Thursday, October 25, 2012

If there was a telling moment in the
strange, if only because of timing, press conference that Mike
Holmgren conducted earlier this week it was this. The outgoing
president said he was hired to essentially be former owner Randy
Lerner’s surrogate. Sure enough, that’s what he became, a
reclusive, indecisive, hem-hawing mess of an executive in a job that
seemed perfect in theory and a disaster in practice. You know,
pretty much the working definition of Lerner’s tenure as the
reluctant owner he was.

Ok, so there was another telling moment
in the press conference as well and it was that the aging has-been
still desires to coach. What’s so telling about that statement is
that he had every opportunity to jump into that fray in Cleveland and
perhaps actually start righting the ship but declined in favor of
doing Pat Shurmur a solid by giving him his first head coaching job.

Nothing about Holmgren’s tenure as
the president of the Browns makes much sense in retrospect. Holmgren
was asked again about why he wasted a year by keeping Mangini in
place and gave the same stock answer—he wanted to be fair to
Mangini. That sounds fine except for the fact that his charge was
broader than protecting a member of the coaching fraternity.
Holmgren was charged with putting the pieces together of a franchise
that’s been in shambles since that day it was established in its
reconstituted from. It was supposed to be at times a difficult job
that would probably result in some blood being spilled.

It was from that moment on where
Holmgren essentially did a disservice to fans of the Cleveland
Browns. Unfortunately it didn't get much better from there.

That the Browns have a new owner is
meaningful only because until last Tuesday that Browns effectively
functioned without an owner. Lerner wasn’t the worst owner in the
history of professional sports. Once Ted Stepien thrust himself on
the world the award for worst owner was permanently retired. But
Lerner was a bad owner because he was so indifferent about his stake.

No one would have much cared if Lerner
played the rich, indifferent bounder if he had been doing so AFTER
hiring people who ran counter to his type. But Lerner’s
dispassionate attitude permeated a culture in Berea that was quickly
adopted by all who orbited around him. Ultimately the same reasons
that Lerner was a lousy owner are the same reasons that Holmgren was
a lousy president of the Browns.

I’m not sure if the role of president
just didn’t fit Holmgren or that Holmgren worked to hard to fit
into the role of Lerner surrogate, right down to the almost
non-sensical rantings of alleged passion that were completely
untethered to the reality of his conduct.

What Lerner never understood about his
role is exactly the same thing Holmgren never stood about his role
and what ultimately doomed them both. No one ever saw Lerner put in
a lick of work toward improving this team and its prospects. Ditto
for Holmgren. Both told us how hard they were working behind the
scenes and asked the fans to essentially take the truth of those
assertions on a leap of faith.

It’s a strange dynamic, certainly,
but in the kind of high profile roles both Lerner and Holmgren
occupied, it was incumbent upon them to actually show the fans that
they were working hard, even if it was exactly that, a show.

Fans may not like the jobs that Tom
Heckert and Shurmur are doing, but at least they can see them both
working. Players come and go, sometimes on a daily basis, as the
Browns fiddle with their roster. That’s the work of Heckert.
Practices are conducted daily and the Browns play weekly. That’s
the work of Shurmur. Irrespective of the results, there’s not
question that each is putting in the time.

Holmgren and Lerner on the other hand
had an aversion to working in public. Lerner gave a handful of
interviews in the 10 years or so of his ownership but these were
always after the season. Once in awhile he was forced to do
something publicly, as when he had to chastise Phil Savage for, well,
being an idiot by f-bombing a fan. The theory, and it was really
only just that, a theory, about Lerner was that he was publicity shy.
But a competing theory, equally valid as invalid, was that Lerner
simply didn’t want to be discovered as a phony. There’s
something about the camera that both reveals and defines character
and from all outward appearances, the privately nice guy was nothing
more than an empty sport coat.

That’s where Holmgren and Lerner
departed. Holmgren wasn’t a phony, certainly. He was just an old
football coach kicked upstairs as the pressures and anxieties of
coaching grew beyond his ability to manage them. Sure he missed the
limelight as he occasionally flirted with the idea of returning to
the sidelines, including right before Shurmur was hired. And you get
the sense, don’t you, that while Holmgren liked the idea of giving
the job to Shurmur, he really couldn’t see anyone else occupying
the only real job he ever wanted—head coach in the NFL.

I wrack my brain trying to find one
accomplishment of note of the Holmgren era and can find none. Indeed
it’s far easier to find the flaws of his approach, from the wasted
year of Mangini to the testy, ill-conceived press conferences, to
the decision to not go all in on Robert Griffin III. Argue all you
want that the franchise is in better shape now then it was when
Holmgren came in but you’ll have trouble finding objective proof to
back it up.

I had high hopes for Holmgren because
of his reputation. And while I still believe that Holmgren could
have done great things here, what I didn’t anticipate was that
Holmgren wouldn’t go “all in” on his new role, deliberately
undermining the very goals he set for himself and the franchise.

I assumed Holmgren would embrace the
role just as he said he would, made excuses early on when he claimed
to be working behind the scenes from the comfy confines of his home
in Arizona (or Seattle, but certainly not Cleveland), and then
finally had my eyes opened wide when he admitted that he had no idea
that half of this year’s roster was composed of freshmen and
sophomores.

In the pantheon of disasters that have
been owners/front office/coaches/managers in Cleveland sports
history, Holmgren only cracks, maybe, the top 25. But as an
allegedly transformational figure of the moment, his place in our
community’s ever growing Hall of Shame should be preserved forever.

**

The press conference Joe Banner, the
team’s new CEO (new person, new title) was numbing in its sameness.
That’s not criticism of Banner, it’s just that you won’t find
a sentence either Banner or Haslam uttered that fans haven’t heard
before and before and before and before that, too. Every new face
that travels through Berea says pretty much the same thing because,
frankly, there’s nothing much else that can be said.

I’d say that Banner has his work cut
out for himself but no more so than Holmgren had or Phil Savage or
fill in the blank with whatever name you want. The Browns 2.0 was a
hastily assembled franchise thanks to the NFL and its dithering over
choosing the initial owner and it’s never really caught up.

If there was one thing that has even
the slightest whiff of new from Banner it was his acknowledgement
that this franchise doesn’t need another 5-year plan to turn itself
around. I couldn’t agree more. Whatever else you might feel about
the roster at this moment, the paradigm has shifted in the NFL.
Player movement has never been greater. The draft is as important as
ever but clever teams with good general managers can and do build
depth much more quickly when the draft was the only way to fill out a
team. With less rounds and hence more unsigned free agents and the
significant number of mid-level type free agents available every off
season, improving this roster isn’t nearly as hard as the fans have
been told it is.

There’s a reason a team like the New
England Patriots is a perennial contender despite turning over its
roster each off season as much as any other team in the league.
Sure, having Tom Brady, one of the greatest NFL quarterbacks ever, on
your side is a huge draw for potential free agents. But more to the
point is the simple fact that love him or hate him Bill Belichick’s
real talent isn’t necessarily his game day coaching but his
approach to roster building. He consistently finds undervalued
players (from a salary cap perspective) signs them while
simultaneously discarding higher marquee and often overvalued (again,
from a salary cap perspective) players. Belichick’s brought the
concept of WARP, the ultimate geek stat from baseball, to pro
football and it’s worked.

If nothing else that’s where the
Browns’ deep thinkers have consistently failed this franchise.
They make lousy free agent acquisitions and I’m not just or even
talking about brand names. I’m talking about all the integral
pieces and parts that build the depth and make it palatable for a
team to incur injuries to its starters. No team can win when its
backup to a player like Joe Haden, a decent but certainly not elite
defensive back, and plugs in Buster Skrine.

If you want further evidence as to how
the paradigm has changed then look no further than the willingness of
virtually every team to play a rookie quarterback right out of the
gate. It’s an acknowledgement that today’s crop of quarterbacks,
products of the increasing emphasis on skills building from middle
school on up, are just better prepared for the pro game then their
predecessors.

If Heckert and Holmgren can conclude
after just one season that Colt McCoy isn’t going to cut it as a
top tier quarterback, why is it that those kinds of decisions can’t
be made at every spot on the roster? The answer is that of course
they can and they should.

That’s where, I think, Banner’s
assessment of Heckert will matter. I don’t know who ultimately
lost his nerve in trying to pull off the trade for Robert Griffin
III, but it’s that lack of foresight that actually permeates the
thinking in Berea now and for all the previous years of Browns 2.0 as
well. It manifests in the big ways like the failed trade to get the
rights to draft Griffin, and in the small ways like talking
themselves out of signing this free agent or that, you know the kind
that build depth.

**

Is it just me or is Shurmur getting
more and more testy with each passing day? We can only go by what we
see, as an old coach used to tell the fans, and right now Shurmur is
a guy working on the edge and for good reason.

You can dissect Sunday's game against
the Colts in a hundred different ways but you're still left with an
overarching feeling that the team just wasn't quite ready to play.
The mistakes weren't confined to the rookies. Veterans like Ray
Ventrone and Reggie Hodges were doing some pretty boneheaded things
as well. One the mistakes multiply like they did on Sunday it tends
to be evidence of a team that lack sufficient preparation.

Shurmur is under fire because he's a
lousy game day coach. He's also going to find himself feeling even
tighter in the shorts if his team keeps playing like a mistake-ridden
mess. And if Shurmur is going to get prickly with the media types
asking questions about what everyone can readily see, then Shurmur
isn't long for this job. He'll need to fall back under the radar
accorded a coordinator.

It was amusing to hear Shurmur say in
his press conference Monday, in response to a question about the
rather physical reaction Haslam had to the pass that Josh Gordon
dropped, that Shurmur likes to keep his emotions in check. Yea, we
noticed. It barely looks like he's breathing, as if he's using the
tension and tug of game day to work on some far flung yoga breathing
technique.

It also was amusing because it seemed
to be a little backhanded at Haslam, a way of saying that Haslam too
should keep his emotions in check. One of the abiding problems with
this franchise is that it's been permeated by Type C personalities.
It's kind of nice to see a Type A holding the keys to the castle at
the moment.

**

Considering how tense Shurmur's been
lately, this week's question to ponder: How long will it be before
Shurmur has his Jim Mora moment?

Monday, October 22, 2012

Rookies make mistakes. So do veterans.
But the story of the Cleveland Browns’ latest loss isn’t just
about rookie and veteran mistakes. One of the great things we know
about that loss is that it’s as much, if not more, about the story
of head coach Pat Shurmur’s increasingly shaky grip on his current
job than anything else. Shurmur demonstrated once again that for all
the mistakes of the players he leads, it’s his own mistakes that
hurt this team even more. The simple truth is that the fans
shouldn’t expect the players to get better until the coach gets
better.

The Browns 17-13 loss to the Colts has
many parents. It was mistake-filled, from the botched hold by Reggie
Hodges (who had a miserable day overall) on an extra point that put
the Browns in a position where a field goal wouldn’t be enough to
the two holding calls on veteran Ray Ventrone on two kick returns to
even the Billy Winn offsides penalty and the various false starts
that serve as drive killers. The cumulative weight of all these
little indignities usually spells defeat, as they did Sunday, and yet
it wasn’t as if the Indianapolis Colts were playing mistake-free.
They were practically begging the Browns to win the game. I turned
on the radio broadcast from the Colts near the end of the game and
their announcers were almost apoplectic about how the Colts were
surely handing the game to the lowly Browns; bold talk from a team
that rightly should have lost all its games last season.

Sure you can put the blame on wide
receiver Josh Gordon who dropped what would have been a potentially
game winning touchdown for the ultimate loss. But that too would
miss the larger point. Shurmur’s lack of nerve, his “let’s not
seize the day” approach to decision making continues to reinforce
among his charges that he doesn’t have their backs. So why would
they have his?

There’s been plenty of written
already about Shurmur once again eschewing a 4th and 1
late in the game in favor of Jim Tressel’s favorite play, the punt.
But what the heck, let’s pile on as well. Shurmur’s lack of guts
reveals a very bothersome and ultimately debilitating flaw in his
makeup as a head coach. It deserves to be examined and re-examined.

We all know the scenario by now
because, hell, it was the same scenario as a few weeks ago. It was
late in the game, the Browns needing a score and Shurmur deciding
that the best way to get a touchdown was to put the game in the hands
of his shaky defense and, what, hope they recover a fumble?

Shurmur doesn’t get a chance to
demonstrate his cowardly streak if Gordon catches that pass on what
was a 3rd and 1 play. And some credit to Shurmur for
trying to catch the Colts flatfooted by throwing long when the run
looked like the safer play. But the second it’s time to give him
credit, Shurmur invalidates that faith.

I don’t know exactly why the Browns’
offense couldn’t get their asses moving quickly enough to run a
play before the time clock expired, I just know that they didn’t
and when quarterback Brandon Weeden saw that only 3 seconds remained
he panicked (rookie) and burned a very critical time out.

Let’s talk a little about that time
out and how it fit into Shurmur’s warped thinking. First, it
caused Shurmur to ignore what looked to be a gut instinct to go for
the first down and try to win the game right there. That gut
instinct would have been solidly backed up statistically. It’s
been well chronicled by this point how head coaches, particularly in
the NFL, often ignore the higher percentage play of fourth down out
of loss aversion. But here, Shumur shouldn’t have even been
suffering from loss aversion. The Browns never had this game won in
the first place. They weren’t on the verge of losing anything
because what’s another loss for a team that has cornered the market
on competitive losses? Instead of recognizing that bit of
circumstance Shurmur decided to make it that much more difficult to
win the game, which was the last thing this team needed. If anything
Shurmur suffers from win aversion.

Second, because the time out was
stupidly burned, it actually made the decision to go for it on 4th
down that much easier, or should have. The problem with the “pin
‘em back” strategy that Shurmur trusts more than his offense is
that it also requires all of your time outs for it to work best.
When you can’t stop the clock, opposing NFL teams are pretty good
at bleeding it well. Why Shurmur saw this as a more compelling
reason to punt and not less is perhaps the biggest mystery in trying
to figure out how his brain works.

Now of course Shurmur defends the
decision by noting the after-the-fact result. The defense did hold
the Colts and the Browns did get the ball back. The key there though
is that he’s relying on the after-the-fact outcome to justify a
decision that had to be made when he didn’t have the benefit of
hindsight, except of course the kind of hindsight that comes with
having made the same decision previously with the same, predictable
dispiriting result just two weeks ago.

What Shurmur can’t seem to grasp is
what is becoming his fatal flaw. He simply can’t see how the lack
of confidence he exhibits in his own decision making infuses the
players with the same inevitable sense of doom and loss.

Let’s roll the tape further and see
what really happened. Hodges punted 21 yards, which was nearly as
big a disaster as when he botched the hold on the extra point early
in the game. The inability of a punter at a crucial moment to put
the ball inside the 10 yard line from the 50 yard line suggests that
Shurmur and his staff should spend quality time this week auditioning
new punters.

Then the defense did hold the Colts to
a 3-and-out and forced the punt. But Holdges’ lousy punt ensured
the Browns would start in worse position, which they did, about 30
yards worse, then they voluntarily gave up. If that weren’t
enough, the Browns now had 2 ½ minutes less time and that much more
yardage to get the touchdown it still needed. (And as an aside, why
is it that Shurmur seems to have enough faith in his defense to force
a 3-and-out with the Colts backed up further but not the same faith
that this defense can perform that trick if the Colts are starting
from their own 41-yard line, which is where they would have started
from had the 4th down play not been successful? If you
can figure that one out then congratulations, you’ve just been
elected president of the Pat Shurmur fan club.)

But football is as much emotion as
talent and at that point all things were not created equal. The
offense that felt a little surge of confidence with a deep throw on
3rd and 1 that almost worked was now not even close to the
offense now on the field. In the interim they had been publicly
embarrassed by their own coach who concluded for the entire world to
see (or at least those few small corners that cared) that he didn’t
believe his offense was good enough just a few minutes earlier to
get 1 yard. It begs the question, doesn’t it, as to how the hell
it was now going to move most of the length of the field and grab a
touchdown? Not surprisingly, they didn’t come close.

If the reaction of Jimmy Haslam III
from the owners’ box is any indication, this telling sequence of
the events was harder for him to digest then a 3-day old brat from a
street cart vendor.

It makes me wonder too what Haslam
would do if this week were a bye week. Would he live up to his
promise not to make any changes midseason? I know the temptation
would have to be to move beyond Shurmur now and at least send the
message to the troops (fans included) that it’s no longer business
as usual.

No one is suggesting that Shurmur needs
to be an unnecessary risk taker just to prove his mettle. But in a
business context he needs to understand what appropriate risks there
are to take. The Browns are 1-6, the worst team in the NFL, and have
offered precious little to their fans for years to suggest that now,
finally, this team is on the right path. Shurmur doesn’t come
across as a person who even understands context or risk, which makes
him ill suited to coach a team run by a businessman who clearly
understands both. Shurmur may not get fired midseason but there’s
no doubt that after Sunday’s game, this will be his last season in
Cleveland.

**

To go back to where we started, one of
the things fans had to expect when they saw how general manager Tom
Heckert put this roster together was that most games would be
mistake-filled messes. The fact that it’s turned out that way
shouldn’t surprise.

The Browns, by virtue of their
mistake-plagued record, most certainly lead the league in competitive
losses. Other than the manhandling at the hands of the New York
Football Giants a week ago, the Browns have basically been
competitive all season.

But let’s not use that as some sort
of evidence that the ship is righted. The truth that was revealed
again Sunday is that Browns 2.0, now in its 14th season,
probably leads the league in competitive losses for the entirety of
its existence. Eric Mangini managed to keep games close. So did
Butch Davis and Romeo Crennel. And just like the competitive losses
under prior head coaches didn’t end up translating into actual
wins, there’s no reason to believe that the competitive losses like
Sunday will magically translate into wins anytime soon either.

It’s a little jarring that Heckert
hasn’t adequately explained, or really explained inadequately for
that matter, why he put so many kids on the roster. Indeed, one of
the reasons Mike Holmgren is enjoying retirement with Randy Lerner’s
money stems from the disconnect between him and his general manager
over this issue. Holmgren admitted he hadn’t realized that Heckert
had constructed the roster as he did, thus demonstrating that if he
had his hand on the pulse, it wasn’t the pulse of this team. Ouch.

The lack of communication from Browns’
management is a given and Heckert and his silence about this mess of
a roster is in keeping with that grand tradition. So we’re left to
surmise. At the very least, whether or not you agree with how the
roster was put together, you can surmise credibly that Heckert
doesn’t suffer from the same lack of confidence that plagues
Shurmur. If nothing else, putting together a roster that almost
certainly would be prone more to mistakes than wins was essentially a
statement that Heckert was willing to stand behind his skills as a
talent evaluator. Heckert obviously felt that the short term pain of
the coming year would be worth it in the long run or even later in
the season.

Well, a loss like Sunday’s is another
reminder of just how much that pain can actually hurt. At 1-6 this
Browns team is running out of games in which to put together an even
respectable record, forget a winning record. At some point soon and
well before next season, this team is going to have to turn these
competitive losses into wins to justify the faith Heckert has in
himself and some of the suspects he’s allowed on this roster.

Let’s be clear about one thing.
Finding new or even more competitive ways to lose as the season comes
to a close isn’t going to save Heckert’s job. Nothing short of
actual winning will accomplish that. Yet there’s only so much the
players can overcome and the one thing they can’t for now is the
tentative nature of their head coach. Having gone all in on this
roster the one thing Heckert apparently missed and what could
ultimately undo his entire strategy is the weak link that Shurmur has
become.

**

For as much attention he garners, one
could be excused for thinking that as Greg Little goes so goes the
entire team. That will never be the case.

It was nice to see Little finally hold
on to the football but one game does not make a trend. Weeden
clearly was not throwing much in Little’s direction the last few
weeks, sending a message in the process. Maybe Precious Little got
the message, if 6 catches Sunday means anything. Maybe he didn’t,
if all the missed blocks mean anything.

Nonetheless, while blocking is a core
competency for a wide receiver, Little needs to catch the ball to
stay on the field and took a step in the right direction Sunday, even
as the rest of the team was taking a step back.

**

Speaking of run blocking, the Browns
looked clueless in their quest to establish a consistently feared
running game. The New York Jets absolutely shredded the Colts run
defense the week before and yet the Browns of Sunday looked like any
other version of the Browns 2.0, you know the ones that would send
Travis Prentice or James Jackson into a mass of humanity and then
wonder why the run game never worked.

Trent Richardson was a bit confusing on
his own health, saying both that he was fine and more hurt then he
was letting on. What was true was that he was ineffective so sitting
him down for the second half and trying to catch lightening in a
bottle again with Montario Hardesty wasn’t among Shurmur’s worst
ideas. That said, Shurmur decided not to actually use Hardesty all
that much. Shurmur called the game as if the Browns were down by 20
and essentially needed to pass every play. They didn't.

In any event, let's be honest about
Hardesty. He's only demonstrated that he’s a very average running
back and Richardson demonstrated that it’s hard to be physical when
your ribs are broken. Maybe that's why Hardesty acted as mostly a
decoy. That put the game on Weeden’s shoulders. He delivered a
credible performance. The pass that Gordon dropped was damn near as
perfect of a pass as you’re likely to see. And he didn’t add to
his league-high number of interceptions, either.

But putting any game solely on Weeden
at this point isn’t among Shurmur’s better ideas. Weeden may
resemble Randy Lerner facially but he has much more guile. Yet
Weeden still doesn’t know everything he doesn’t know at this
stage of his career. It falls on Weeden for calling that ill-advised
time out. It’s his job to get the players in a position for the
next play. That failing, as I noted above, gave Shurmur enough time
to revisit a decision in the most unfortunate way.

Weeden has made dramatic improvement
since week one and is playing as well as any rookie quarterback not
named Robert Griffin III. Given that it is reasonable to expect that
Weeden will someday be able to maintain calm while all others around
him, including an overmatched coaching staff, are losing their heads.
But that time is not just yet and Sunday more than proved that as
well.

**

Next up is the San Diego Chargers, a
mercurial team that perfectly matches the mercurial nature of their
head coach, Norv Turner. Nonetheless, it will be another game where
the road team is favored in Cleveland. If that doesn’t inform
Haslam’s thinking about the team he just overpaid for, nothing
will.

Monday, October 15, 2012

Before anything else, we know now the
Cleveland Browns will not go winless in 2012. That became a
certainty around 3:50 PM EDT on Sunday when safety Sheldon Brown,
whose has had trouble covering just about every receiver he’s faced
this season, picked off Bengals quarterback Andy Dalton and went in
for a touchdown giving the Browns an insurmountable lead in their
34-24 victory.

We also know that the Browns will not
go winless in their division in 2012. For all the reasons we already
know, the Browns have had trouble with Pittsburgh, Baltimore and
Cincinnati for the last few years. Actually more like the last 12
years. You’d think that dumb luck coupled with the fact that the
Browns see each of these teams twice a year would account for more
wins in their division then they’ve had. The Browns unfortunately
have been mostly dumb at making their own luck and thus as satisfying
as Sunday’s win was, it was more satisfying simply because it
killed two Cyclops with one win, so there is that.

We also know that if quarterback
Brandon Weeden could play against Cincinnati every week, he’d make
the Pro Bowl this season. Weeden has a quarterback rating that is
around 92 vs. the Bengals and around 52 vs. the rest of the league (a
limited sample, to be sure). It’s an odd circumstance, but if
you're going to own an opponent it might as well be one in your
division.

The Bengals aren’t awful in the same
sense that the Browns are awful, but the Browns don’t represent the
best barometer against which to measure awful. You can't go nearly
11 months without a win without sinking to the bottom of pile. The
Bengals live in the vicinity with a bunch of other teams, but they're
closer neighbors to the Browns then they'd care to admit.

The Bengals have averaged a tidy 6.5
wins each year since 1999, the time period that parallels Browns 2.0.
(If you want to go back further, the 10 years prior to that were even
worse when they averaged 4.6 wins.) Given all the built in advantages
of an incumbent team, the Bengals have squandered them like a barfly
squanders brain cells on a Saturday night. It’s just that the
Browns, residing in the same division, have been even worse so we
don’t tend to notice the disquieting level of suck coming from the
Queen City.

But if you were a member of the Brown
family, I'm sure you'd see things differently, particularly if your
primary goal is to run things as cheaply as possible. In a testament
to frugalness that looks like patience to those who don’t know
better, the Brown family, the cheapest owners since fictional Vegas
showgirl Rachel Phelps inherited the fictional Cleveland Indians in
the too-true-life movie Major League, changed course about 10 years
ago. They had been going through their own series of incompetent
head coaches with little to show for it except angina so they hit
upon something else. They hired Marvin Lewis and have let him toil
for the last 10 years despite his having more than proven that as a
head coach he makes a nice coordinator.

But in a sense I see where they’re
coming from. By sticking with Lewis they avoided having their
capital structure infected by Lernerism, the malady by which an
in-over-his-head-and-indifferent-about-it-anyway owner hires coach
after coach as a way of placating fans and then pays them off on
contracts they never deserved in the first place. By hanging on to
Lewis, the Brown family has avoided the messy divorces that Lerner
has gone through with everyone he's ever hired and as a bonus have
seen their average win total creep up to just under 7 wins a season
in those 10 years.

That kind of backdrop in some measure
explains why a 29-year-old rookie quarterback can look so great
against the Bengals. They have a habit of making boatloads of other
quarterbacks look good, too.

But let’s not take the sheen off of
Sunday’s victory just yet. That will come soon enough anyway.
There’s 10 more games left in the season and plenty of
opportunities to either build on or squander the good will generated
by that win. You'd like to think the Browns have it in them to run
counter to type but the last time a Cleveland team did something it
wasn't supposed to was, well, 1964.

So say it again and be happy. The
Browns won’t finish the season winless. With the victory, they’ve
rejoined the ranks of the merely awful, matching the win totals thus
far of 4 other teams. It’s officially a battle for next year’s
number one draft choice.

**

Six games into the season, it’s
probably safe to conclude that the Browns’ offense is better than
last year’s mess to the tune of nearly an extra touchdown per game.
Some of that is undoubtedly skewed by the simple fact that they have
played the Bengals in fully one-third of those games. That’s
actually worse news for the Bengals than the Browns.

The Bengals have given up the third
most points in the AFC and fully one-third of those games have been
against the Browns, a team with one of the worst offenses last
season. (Not for nothing, but the Browns and Bengals have given up
the same number of points so the Browns, too, are tied for
third-worse in the AFC, which in turn skews the Bengals’ relatively
lofty offensive stats as well).

Weeden continues to be an interception
machine. His 10 lead the league but guess who’s right behind him?
Yes, that Andy Dalton with 9. Weeden is 29th in the
league with a 55.2% completion rate, yet he’s 9th in
league in overall yards. If he were completing 60% of his passes,
which is at the bottom of what is considered good, he’d be around
6th or 7th overall in the league in passing.
Would that mean anything in the win column? Probably not, but Weeden
isn't embarrassing himself out there, either.

What Weeden is doing is getting a good
amount of yardage for his completions. The bomb to Josh Cooper on
Sunday certainly helped, but it’s also clear that Weeden likes to
throw downfield and Shurmur likes Weeden to throw downfield. It’s
also why Weeden is an interception machine.

What’s somewhat stunning about
Weeden’s numbers is the fact that, charitably, the Browns'
receiving corps is in transition. To be more honest, it's a
receiving corps that's made up of essentially 4 slot receivers, a
speedy project, and a couple of minor talents at tight end. Cooper
and the other Josh, Gordon, are relatively intriguing. It would be
more useful, though, if one or the other was fast enough to
legitimately play on the outside.

Greg Little was supposed to take a step
forward this season and hasn’t. I’d say he’s regressed but
that's only if you measure it against where you thought he'd be or
where he should be given his draft status. In actuality, he’s
pretty much the same butter fingered receiver as a year ago.

In Sunday’s game, as in last week’s
loss, Little comes across as someone who’s entered the witness
protection program and is trying to preserve his new identity. He
remains, from a contribution perspective, Precious Little. He caught
3 quite harmless passes for a grand total of 18 yards.

But there is a glimmer of light. On
Sunday Little seemed to take his blocking duties far more seriously
than at any time this season. That perhaps is the best sign that a
receiver understands he’s on the coach’s shit list and wants to
get off it. No one seems willing to trust Little on what might be an
important reception so they keep him interested for now by sending a
few passes his way while watching to see if he pouts the rest of the
time. For what it’s worth, Little doesn’t appear to be pouting.

We’ve picked on Little plenty because
there’s been plenty to pick on. But perhaps there’s no player on
the Browns’ current roster that is offering less right now than
fullback Owen Marecic. Browns fans are used to management
overpromising and under delivering, so the fact that Marecic is lousy
when we were told he’d be good is of no moment. What is of the
moment is how truly awful Marecic has been. The only one
contributing less to the team right now is Mike Holmgren but another
game like Sunday’s and Marecic will take over that spot as well.

Ostensibly a fullback, Marecic’s main
job is to open holes for Trent Richardson. He’s been a spectacular
failure. Time and again running plays get blown up because of a
missed block by Marecic. On the surface it looks like Richardson is
having a more difficult transition to the NFL than Weeden when the
opposite should be the case. But one of the reasons Richardson is
struggling is that he gets virtually no secondary blocks.

The offensive line is doing a credible
enough job blocking to allow Richardson some room to maneauver but
when teams stack 7 or 8 in the box there simply isn’t enough
linemen to go around. That’s why it’s important for a player
like Marecic to add some support by helping open the holes that
Richardson is supposed to run through.

Watching Marecic block is like watching
Alex Rodriguez bat in the post season. If he’s not outright
whiffing at an opposing lineman or linebacker, he’s chipping at him
in a way that's hardly noticed by the opposition. At most, when it
comes to blocking Marecic's nickname should be Snafu because he
causes only minor inconveniences to the opposition. Indeed you can
make the argument that whatever success Richardson’s had thus far
is more than he deserves.

Occasionally Marecic’s also called on
to run the ball or be an outlet receiver. He had a grand total of 4
rushing attempts last season and has none this year. He’s been
thrown to 5 times this year and has dropped every one of them,
including two on Sunday. In other words, the only reason his
failures aren’t felt on a grander level is simply because head
coach Pat Shurmur has all but eliminated his chances to fail. Why
he's ever given any chance remains a mystery.

**

Part of the reason Shurmur has felt his
shorts getting a little tight in the seat has to do with his rather
odd play calling in crucial situations. But if you want to maintain
any credibility as a critic, you have to acknowledge when the calls
go the right way as well.

In particular were the back to back
plays midway through the 4th quarter that led to the
Browns taking a 27-17 lead. The first play was a 3rd and
1 pass from the Cincinnati 26 yard line. It was a situation that
screamed “run,” particularly given how well Montario Hardesty had
been running. But Weeden faked the handoff and hit tight end Jordan
Cameron for what became a 23 yard gain, down to the Cincinnati 3-yard
line.

The Browns were then forced to call
time out because, apparently, no one else on the offense could get
set in time given how giddy they were over a gutsy call finally
working. During the time out, Shurmur essentially called for the
same play when a few runs into the line would have been far more
expected. It worked again as Weeden found a wide open Ben Watson for
the 3-yard touchdown. It was as fine a series of play calling as
Shurmur has had since he's been in Cleveland.

**

I'd say it was an appropriate way for
Randy Lerner to go out as majority owner, but for that to be true
Lerner would have to actually show up at the game to experience it
first hand. By all accounts Lerner disappeared the day the papers
were signed and hasn't been seen in Berea since.

The fact that it was owner in waiting
Jimmy Haslam III in the locker room after the game smiling and
shaking hands tells you as much about the difference between Haslam
and Lerner as does the fact that one is self-made and the other
self-involved.

I believe Haslam when he says that
he'll make no moves until the season is over, but his presence has
already made a huge difference. He's not local but there's no
question he's already embraced his ownership in a way that Lerner
never could. I don't know whether or not he'll be a good owner and I
would say it can't get any worse than it was under Lerner, but then I
remember that I said the Browns couldn't get any worse once they
hired Holmgren, Tom Heckert and Shurmur, but then that trio ripped
off a tidy little 11-game winning streak (12 in the division). So
yea, things can actually get worse.

That said, I don't look for it. Haslam
is a successful working businessman. That doesn't always translate,
of course, but it's always nice when the owner understands the value
of a hard day's work. Lerner couldn't relate and never wanted to
anyway. I look for Haslam to bring a business discipline to this
franchise that it's lacked for years. That of course hasn't helped
the fortunes of the Bengals for the last 20 or so years, but to
paraphrase an old Bengal, they don't live in Cleveland. Our
expectations have always been much higher.

Monday, October 08, 2012

“It’s easy to grin, when
your ship comes in and you’ve got the stock market beat;

But the man worthwhile is the man
that can smile when his shorts are too tight in the seat.”

Judge
Smails, at the christening of the Flying Wasp.

There’s no easy grinning in Cleveland
and no one’s ship is coming in. Pat Shurmur’s shorts are getting
awfully tight in the seat, too, as he watches with increasing
impatience as his quarterback makes stupid throws, his linebackers
miss tackles, his defensive secondary leaves opposing receivers
running free and the rest of his players walk around, hands on hips,
wondering why they can’t be free agents at season’s end. And as
Shurmur looks out over the horizon here’s what he really sees: 11
straight losses under his watch, an 0-5 mark this season, the very
real possibility of this team going 0-16 and the increasingly greater
chance that the first phase of his head coaching career will last as
long as the second phase of Eric Managini’s head coaching career,
if he’s lucky.

What we know definitively after an
embarrassing loss to the New York Football Giants is that the Browns
are the worst team in the NFL. We know that for simple reasons like
the fact that they are the only team without a win this season. We
also know it for the more complex reasons like the fact that the
general manager figured it might be an interesting experiment to see
how repurposing the roster to the equivalent of a minor league
baseball team will work in the NFL. No credible franchise sends a
team into a NFL season where most of the players have one year or
less of experience. If you want to know why knowledgeable NFL types
shake their heads at Cleveland, that is the reason.

I consistently hear fans who want to
believe, just have to believe, that the Browns are working their way
through the forest and that Heckert has put this team on the right
track. But this team is demonstrably worse in so many ways than even
last year’s miserable team that it’s getting harder and harder to
defend Heckert.

He drafted Trent Richardson but that
was because he failed to make the trade to secure Robert Griffin III,
a player whose mere presence would have added legitimate hope to the
team. Richardson is a nice player, makes some nice runs, but even
Heckert has to have noticed that it’s far easier to get to an elite
level in this league with a transformational quarterback than a
big-time running back. Adrian Peterson wasn’t moving the needle
that much for the Vikings, which is why they were so vested first in
Brett Favre and now Christian Ponder (a younger Brandon Weeden).

I get on this rant after seeing a game
like Sunday’s because as much as these losses seem to teach us the
same lessons, it’s as if the Browns’ management can’t grasp the
concepts.

Which is why Shurmur’s shorts are
getting so tight. He knows this isn’t going well and that he and
the team stand perilously close to their own fiscal cliff. A loss to
the Bengals next week and it will be clear to everyone, including the
new man in town, that Cleveland hasn’t seen a runaway train of this
magnitude since the days of Chris Palmer.

Did you notice how Shurmur took on
Weeden for that miserable game-turning interception near the end of
the first half? Or maybe Shurmur was referring to Weeden’s other
game-turning interception early in the fourth quarter when he said,
essentially, that it’s time to stop using “Weeden is a rookie”
as an excuse for not making good football decisions.

And I agree with Shurmur but then I
also remember that Shurmur put Weeden in a position to fail, at least
on that first interception. It was 3rd and 1 and
Richardson was running effectively enough so naturally Shurmur
decided that rather than go toe-to-toe with the Giants for two downs
in order to get one yard he’d have Weeden throw the ball. If
Shurmur didn’t see that interception coming then he was the only
one. The 14-year-old son of my girlfriend, a kid who is a Giants fan
and knows nothing about the Browns, said matter of factly before the
play turned into a disaster, “I can’t believe they would throw
here. It will probably get intercepted.” Uh, yea.

Shurmur’s rather prickly response to
being questioned about another questionable game-day call “we have
to either run or throw here so we threw” or something to that
effect. He didn't back off that assessment a day later. Frankly, as
long as he was giving up why not just take a knee and then have Phil
Dawson kick a field goal? But more to the point, why not at least
look like you’re going to maybe run by keeping Richardson in the
game? When Richardson trotted off the field and Chris Ogbonnoya ran
on to the field, the ball already was intercepted.

In context, Weeden isn’t playing like
he’s the worst quarterback or even the worst rookie quarterback in
the league. The interceptions, either one of them, were killers and
they both resulted because Weeden made bad plays. But the reason the
Browns are so lousy in the first place is that there is virtually no
support system in place. The team lacks the kind of players that can
help lift others up when it gets rough.

Let’s contrast for a moment, shall
we, the Browns/Giants game against a nearly identical game taking
place in Indianapolis. They were almost parallel games. The
Packers were the best team last season and they were taking on last
year’s worst team. The Giants, the Super Bowl champs, were doing
similarly, taking on the second or third worst team from last year.
Both were obvious mismatches. The Browns got off to the fast start
they needed, took the MetLife Stadium crowd out of the game and then
folded before the two-minute warning of the first half. There was no
coming back. The Packers had an 18 point lead at halftime. There
was every reason for the Colts to fold. They didn’t. And then
when the Packers regained the lead, 27-22, with just over 4 minutes
remaining in the game, there was every reason for the Colts to fold
again. They didn’t. Instead Andrew Luck, with a major assist from
Reggie Wayne, played like a player with a pedigree, led his team on a
clock killing drive for the touchdown they needed (and the two-point
conversion) that ultimately gave them the victory.

Why can a team like the
Colts, so awful a year ago, rise up when the Browns fold as if they
had just been deal a 3 of spades and a 4 of diamonds in a game of
5-card stud? A big reason is that the Colts and Luck can rely on
someone like Reggie Wayne while the Browns and Weeden can rely on,
exactly who? Greg Little? Josh Gordon? Trent Richardson? Ben
Watson?

When people talk about
the Browns’ lack of depth, that’s exactly what they’re talking
about. For a team to win it has to be able to go to the well for
someone who has been there, won’t panic and will carry the rookies
through the tough spots. But when Heckert gutted the team the way he
did, he also eliminated that possibility and that, more than
anything, is why the Browns lost. They also lost because they suck.

**

If Greg Little thinks
this past week was an anomaly in his developing career, he ought to
think again. The Browns had two receivers out and Weeden still
basically refused to throw a ball to Little. His role was to act as
a decoy which was about the only job he’s capable of doing at this
point.

I loved Weeden’s quote
when he said that Little had a great week of practice and that not
throwing to him was just how it worked out. Yea, it’s exactly how
it worked out. Little has proven himself to be completely unreliable
as a receiver and while Weeden needs help in his decision-making and
badly needs a win, he’s at least mastered that part that says “just
because a guy’s out there doesn’t mean I have to throw to him.”

Indeed, the best way for
Weeden to master the art of going through the progression of receiver
options on every play is for Shurmur to call more plays designed
specifically for Little. It looked as though Weeden consistently
looked off Little in order to throw it someplace else. Maybe there
is hope.

Now the ball really is in
Little’s court. He’ll see far less throws and the few he does
see will be flavored with far more pressure for if he drops any of
those, his next step will be to hire Braylon Edwards’ agent and
find another team willing to take a flyer on a receiver that can’t
catch.

Don’t feel bad for
Little, though. There’s only so much energy a person has and
Little has decided that allocating most of it to establishing an
online persona via Twitter and creating self-aggrandizing post-catch
celebrations is far better for his brand. That’s left precious
little (which is actually a nice little ironic nickname for him)
energy to devote to developing receiving skills.

I really don’t think
Precious Little will ever amount to much in the NFL. He seems to
lack sufficient self-awareness to realize that it’s time to develop
the kind of work ethic needed to succeed in football or, really, in
life. Precious Little is never the last person off the practice
field but he should be. He doesn’t do one thing more than he’s
told to do and it shows.

**

The lingering thought
that I keep returning to about Sunday’s game was how competitive it
really wasn’t. The Giants were far superior coming in to the game
and the Browns, already a bad team when fully healthy, were missing
several starters anyway. When your starting lineup would at best be
back ups on most other teams, what does it say about your back ups?

Which brings us right
back to Buster Skrine. He couldn’t cover a hole in a wall with a
piece of plywood if you spotted him the hammer and the nails. It’s
stunning that of all the out of work and practice squad defensive
backs out there that there isn’t someone better than Skrine. Let
me rephrase that: it’s stunning that of all the out of work and
practice squad defensive backs out there, general manager Tom Heckert
continues to keep Skrine on the roster.

This is one you can’t
hang on Shurmur. He doesn’t have any authority over picking or
maintaining the final roster and apparently lacks sufficient clout or
credibility to force Heckert to do something about Skrine. The
Giants didn’t exactly have the full complement of their receivers
available to Eli Manning but it hardly mattered. I suspect Skrine
could even make Precious Little look like Victor Cruz and that’s
giving full credit to the 6 or 7 passes Little would drop on his way
to a 200+ receiving day against Skrine.

Shumrur isn’t doing
himself many favors with respect to coaching but he’s also being
undone by an inside job. At this point he’d be better off ordering
Dick Jauron to put an extra linebacker in coverage than continue to
throw Skine at opposing receivers and watch as those opposing
receivers laugh all the way to the end zone.

**

The final thing we know
about Sunday’s game is that the rest of the season should be stress
free. Not that there really ever were but certainly now there are no
must-win games on the schedule. Indeed and no matter what Shurmur or
anyone else associated with the Browns would tell you, this team
really is better off now losing any or all of the rest of their games
and ensuring themselves next year’s number one pick, which they can
immediately use on a quarterback whose not already older than half
the league.

I don’t know whether
Geno Smith or Matt Barkley is the next Andrew Luck but if the Browns
do end up with the number one pick, and for the life of me I don’t
know how they’ll blow it but I just know they will, it will be a
choice to make. And let’s hope that if Heckert is still around he
doesn’t try to ransom the pick like the St. Louis Rams did by
thinking that the Browns are set for the next 10 years at quarterback
with Weeden.

While this team can
always use picks, they need a franchise quarterback more than they
need anything else. Fourteen years into Browns 2.0 and this team
still has no identity. There hasn’t been on person from the owner
on down who the fans could honestly say represents what this team is
trying to accomplish.

Maybe Jimmy Haslam III
can be that person. To this point the spot is wide open and there
isn’t any line forming to fill that spot. Randy Lerner never
wanted it. Team president Mike Holmgren isn’t up to that task and
Heckert prefers the background. For now it falls to Shumur and he’s
got his hands so full just trying to get the players dressed for
Sunday that he’ll never find the time to take the spot. The vacuum
remains and that as much as anything is why this team can’t pull
itself out of its tailspin. No one wants to be the leader. They
also can’t because they suck.

Saturday, October 06, 2012

At least Chris Antonetti is polite.
The Cleveland Indians general manager met with the media earlier in
the week to give the typical GM mea culpea that usually follows a
disaster of a season that resulted in someone other than the GM
getting fired. Such is the state of affairs in Cleveland with the
Indians where everything changes and yet remains remarkably the same.

There’s been no rush by anyone to
defend former manager Manny Acta, meaning that no one much is
questioning his firing. But as I recall no one much questioned his
hiring even though he had flamed out in Washington while trying to
guide a talentless roster through turbulent times. Why anyone except
Antonetti and Mark Shapiro and The Dolans thought that Acta would be
any different trying to guide this talentless roster through
turbulent times really tells you pretty much all you need to know
about why things do remain remarkably the same with the Indians
having just experience ANOTHER 90+ loss season.

The players aren’t always the best
guide in determining the effectiveness of their boss so taking their
word on anything is always risky. Especially risky is giving any
weight to anything Chris Perez has to say. I like the fact that he’s
quotable and media friendly and I hope that as long as he remains in
the game he stays exactly that way. But simply because he speaks his
mind shouldn’t be confused in any sense that his comments are
particularly well thought out. Most often they aren’t.

The Indians problems didn’t walk
about the door once Manny Acta was told to gather his personal
belongings and exit stage left, as Perez claimed. The Indians are
being run by the Mad Magzine equivalent of the Usual Gang of Idiots
and their problems really are rooted in incredibly poor
decision-making at these higher levels. Acta had just failed in
almost identical circumstances and here he was now being told to
succeed. Just as Acta, barely breathing, couldn’t yell competence
into players who weren’t, so couldn’t the Gang of Idiots running
the team suddenly turn Acta into a successful manager.

The chain of command that is the
Indians is responsible foremost for the utter disaster of a season.
There’s nothing wrong with living life on a budget and the Oakland
As again proved that good things can come when good decision making
is the skill most valued on a team with limited financial resources.

So in that sense let’s get past the
notion that the Dolans, simply because they lack enough financial
wherewithal to be major league owners, are killing this team in and
of itself through a small budget. More funds would help, but their
far bigger sin given their finances is that they couple it with
incredibly poor decision making.

Why, for example, they wouldn’t hold
either Shapiro or Antonetti or, preferably, both responsible for the
way the season went and simply sacrifice Acta is a question that
hasn’t been answered and probably never will, at least adequately.
The Dolans are the ones that promoted Shapiro even though nothing
about the way he was running the team as general manager suggested
that the promotion was deserved.

You can find individual situations that
worked and even a season or two that went OK under Shapiro but the
evidence against his overall tenure is far more damning. When
Shapiro was promoted to club president the team was in worse shape
from a talent perspective then when he became general manager. It
wasn’t then poised to be competitive and still isn’t. Shapiro is
respected because he’s been around, cleans up nice and is rapid
fire with the kind of buzzwords that often mask actual ability, but
he isn’t respected because he’s accomplished great things. Name
one, just one.

Shapiro, having kept his job, continued
to demonstrate his lack of competence by retaining Antonetti, who was
a bad hire from the outset. Antonetti was basically in charge of the
Indians’ drafting process before taking over as general manager and
of all the weak links in the organization, player development has
been the weakest.

There have been plenty of excuses for
this such as the Indians deliberately avoiding players in the draft
who had signed with certain agents because they knew they couldn’t
meet the agent’s financial demands for the player. But those are
just excuses. Over time, and under Antonetti’s specific direction,
the Indians consistently made the wrong choices in the draft to the
point that there were no viable players they could plug into this
team this season when all the levees around the team failed at the
same time. And let’s face it, the levees all failing at the same
time wasn’t an accident but was the result of maintenance done on
the cheap for years coalescing just as August beckoned.

In his role as general manager,
Antonetti has shown an amazing level of consistency in perpetuating
his bad decisions. I applauded then and still do the idea of the
Ubaldo Jimenez trade because it was bold and the timing was right.
This team needed some boldness. But big risk comes with either big
rewards or big problems. This came with big problems because of
massive misjudgments regarding the players involved in that trade. A
major part of the reason Antonetti makes so much money is precisely
because he is the one that has to take the fall for those decisions.

Then there were the free agent
signings, if you can call them that, of this past season. Everyone
except Antonetti apparently saw them as wrongheaded, at the very
least and that’s what they turned out to be. It’s as if
Antonetti was given $75 and told to buy a enough food to sustain his
family for a week and instead spent $70 of it on lottery tickets and
the other $5 on soda and potato chips. The lottery tickets were all
losers and the soda and potato chips weren’t good for anything more
than a snack and when it was over the fans, as usual, were starving.

This culture of decision making at the
Indians is what is killing this franchise. Whoever the Indians hire
as the next manager, be it Sandy Alomar or Terry Francona, will be
fine in and of itself. Both are qualified, one more so than the
other. But let’s not anyone pretend that it will make a
difference. Antonetti will be making player acquisition and roster
decisions and Shapiro will be doing whatever it is he does and the
Dolans will do whatever it is they do. Until the top of this pyramid
becomes better decision makers this team will continue to the same
path as the Pittsburgh Pirates and the Kansas City Royals.

**

Speaking of decision making, new
Cleveland Browns owner in waiting, Jimmy Haslam III, has let it be
known that no major decisions will get made until after the year is
over. That’s as it should be, of course.

It doesn’t mean that Mike Holmgren
will stick around. He very well could leave of his own accord. But
for those worried that Tom Heckert might leave mid year or those
begging for Pat Shurmur to leave mid year, neither appears likely,
except that I don’t know how even a new owner holds on to Shurmur
if this team doesn’t win a game soon.

I wonder, though, whether Haslam has
seen or will see NFL Films’ latest installment of A Football Life
entitled “Cleveland ’95.” It’s a terrific history lesson on
decision making, taking the long view and making sure an owner
understands his place in the grand scheme of things.

The documentary on the Browns’ 1995
season was fascinating, at the very least. The narrator made the
point early on that if you were there then you can’t forget.
Actually, you can. The overall injustice lingers and should. The
details though got lost to time.

The Browns were 11-5 in 1994 and won a
playoff game under Bill Belichick. The 1994 season had been 3 years
in the making. Art Modell, to his credit, gave Belichick enough
freedom to overhaul the franchise the way he saw fit and Belichick,
to his credit, work tirelessly toward that goal even if he acted like
an asshole publicly while doing so.

The success wasn’t immediate though
in context to Browns 2.0 wasn’t so bad. The team went 6-10 then
7-9 and 7-9 in Belichick’s first three seasons. But anyone
remembering those seasons remembers them mostly for all of the
competitive losses the team piled up, similar to how this current
Browns team piles up competitive losses.

Then it all came together in 1994 and
the Browns really did seem on the precipice. Indeed, the team was
picked as a Super Bowl contender in 1995. After starting off 3-1,
Modell then sabotaged the season by striking a deal with Baltimore to
move the team. The players were every bit as dispirited as the fans.
So were the coaches. And as Belichick says now, with every bit of
sarcasm that only a Browns fan could love, he kept looking around for
help from Modell but he wasn’t to be found. Modell was off in
Baltimore, hiding.

When the wreckage of that season was
completed, the Browns stood at 5-11. And everything that Belichick
had built, and it was formidable, had been mostly wasted when Modell
stupidly fired him.

Modell and his apologists can reinvent
history all they want, but Modell was a terrible decision maker. He
twice fired Hall of Fame coaches and though he ended up with one
Super Bowl it was more the product of a system that Belichick built
in Cleveland that, as Ozzie Newsome admitted in the documentary, he
simply continued in Baltimore. Newsome has been successful in
keeping the Ravens consistently in the contenders conversation but
the team hasn’t nearly reached the heights that Belichick has with
the New England Patriots, a team he rebuilt much like he was
rebuilding the Browns.

The larger point though for Haslam is
that these are lessons in decision making in the context of
professional sports he needs to learn mostly from the way decisions
turn out for those whose processes are flawed. Modell was emotional
and impetuous. He lacked a both a moral center (obviously) and a
fully developed business sense. On the one hand he would give
Belichick the freedom to rebuild which shows a level of understanding
on how it all works but on the other hand even though he could see
the tangible results fired him anyway because Belichick couldn’t
pump air into the balloon that Modell deliberately and irresponsibly
deflated during that '95 season. Then there’s a revealing moment
in the Cleveland ’95 documentary where Newsome recalls that Modell
preferred the Ravens draft a quarterback instead of Jonathan Ogden.
Maybe Modell finally got too tired for the fight but he let Newsome
make the pick the team needed instead of the one Modell wanted and as
a result Ogden stabilized the offensive line like only few others of
that ilk can. Ogden's arrival made a Super Bowl quarterback out of
Trent Dilfer.

Haslam could also learn plenty from how
the Dolans dither over their team. Trust, when the only goal is
stability, isn’t any better formula for success than constantly
changing directions while the game is still being played. I don’t
think that Holmgren and Heckert sink to the level of Shapiro and
Antonetti, but if Haslam stays with them merely for stability and not
for vision, then the mindless, endless wandering through the desert
will continue.

**

With the Cavaliers grinding back to
life, it’s fair to see this upcoming season as a referendum on Dan
Gilbert’s decision making. When LeBron James left town (and, let’s
face it, there was absolutely nothing Gilbert could have done to
change that outcome, not a single thing) Gilbert discovered that the
hole left behind was much larger than it should have been.

Enter Grant. Since taking over Grant
has made a number of moves to try and fill in those gaps. Kyrie
Irving isn’t James but he isn’t Bobby Sura either. The potential
in the moves is promising and while this season isn’t make or break
it will start to form the real foundation of whether the Cavs can get
back to being a top level team in the NBA-mandated 8-10 years of
penance that must be paid during any rebuilding process.

Gilbert is a bold decision maker who
seems to put equal weight on both the process and the outcome. He’ll
give Grant enough rope but he won’t Grant’s loyalty blind him to
Grant’s failures should that be what develops. That’s probably
how it should be.

This Cavs season will be interesting
not from a win/loss standpoint but more from whether or not Grant can
buck the trend of the other GMs in this town who have not been up to
the challenges of their tasks and whether or not Gilbert will have
the patience to even let us find this out. It’s not a sexy outlook
and certainly not one that sells tickets this season but if they get
the balance right, it will sell plenty of tickets eventually.

**

As long as we’re on the topic of both
bad decision making and the Cleveland Indians, this week’s question
to contemplate: Why would anyone renew a season ticket package at
any level with the Indians?